Alice Oswald begins her luminous poem Memorial with two hundred names. As the work unfolds, these names follow their owners into the hullabaloo and upset of war. Each one comes with a nanosecond’s visibility, a camera flash of passionate lyric. For a brief moment – too soon to know them, but long enough to mourn them – we see these young men leaping, screaming, running forward into dust and confusion.

And as fast as they go by, with just that speed Oswald cuts their moment into a keen, contemporary freshness of language. Here for instance is Diomedes, dealing with corpses on the battlefield ‘Red faced, quietly like a butcher keeping up with his order’. Or Pandarus, furious with himself for being in the war at all. If he ever gets home, he thinks, to his wife and his ‘high-roofed house’, he ‘will smash this bow / and throw it with my own hands into the fire’.

Now more men, more moments. All are lit by Oswald’s signature alloy of diction, both hip and oracular. Soldier after soldier goes by. And however dismayed by their fate, every reader can relish the sheer verve of language that conveys it. In a few searing lines each name joins a young man, until all of them stand in front of us. Here’s Pylaemenes, whose ‘heart was made of coarse cloth’ and whose ‘manners were loose like old sacking’. And Iphidamus, a ‘big, ambitious boy’, so determined to fight that even on his wedding night his new bride thought ‘he seemed to be wearing armour’. And Echepolus who died ‘letting the darkness leak down over his eyes’.

All of them are moving in one direction. All the names, neatly cataloged in the first pages of this poem, are following their owners into oblivion. They will all die in front of us before the poem is over. And we shouldn’t be surprised. There can be no other ending. In fact, they have already died long ago. They have already been named by Homer in the Iliad. Now Alice Oswald names them again.

Memorial is built on Homer’s Iliad. It stands squarely on an epic foundation. The names are the same. Some of the actions are the same. The locations are identical. The similes are comparable. But why, the reader might ask, do these young men need to die again? Didn’t Homer already lay them down in his great text?

These questions, far from being unsettling, are exciting. As are the clues Oswald offers in her preface. Despite her strong background as a classicist and her plain love for Homer’s epic, she is candid about taking liberties. ‘My approach to translation,’ she writes, ‘is fairly irreverent. I work closely with the Greek, but instead of carrying the words over into English, I use them as openings through which to see what Homer was looking at.’

Oswald acknowledges the Iliad as debt and detour. ‘This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story.’ She speaks of stripping away narrative, and this purposeful reductiveness clarifies our view. Through it we can look freshly, to paraphrase her, at what Homer was looking at. And what we see there is remarkable.

What we see above all is that the atmosphere of epic has no expiry date. The soldiers here are not ciphers any more than they are merely symbols in the Iliad. In fact, the opposite is true. They are the brothers, husbands, sons of every war. And as we put down Memorial we wonder whether we first met them in Homer’s epic or saw them on last night’s news bulletin.

II

Alice Oswald describes Memorial as an ‘excavation of the Iliad’. In her preface she places herself in the active role of oral inheritor, rather than the more passive one of translator. ‘I write through the Greek, not from it – aiming for translucence rather than translation,’ she states. ‘I think this method, as well as my reckless dismissal of seven-eighths of the poem, is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable but always adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.’

The spirit of oral poetry is everywhere in Memorial. In the catalogs, in the cadences, but especially in Oswald’s decision that her method should remove ‘narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping’. After that, she writes, ‘What’s left is a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers’.

It is the similes juxtaposed to the biographies that make the reader part of the action. Oswald lays the lyric world beside violent death, like someone putting summer flowers in a coffin: a reminder of all that’s been lost. In one compelling passage, the death of a soldier, Scamandrius, is paired with a haunting simile of childhood. The graphic violence of his end – ‘One spear-thrust through the shoulders / And the point came out through the ribs’ – is framed by an animated sketch of a small, yearning child. The pairing is unforgettable.

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

These similes also allow Oswald to use one of the most compelling strategies in this book. The biography of each dead and dying soldier is followed by a simile. The similes occur in short stanzas like the one above, mentioning woodlands, children, sunlight, locales. These in turn serve to widen the blunt record of death into the music of elegy. They help to get at that essence of epic on which Oswald is so obviously focused. But just as we take this in, just as we absorb the juxtaposition, the simile-stanza is repeated. In fact, every simile-stanza occurs twice, right through the poem. The effect is intense. The soldiers die in one paragraph, but the world they lose occurs in two. The repeated stanzas hold an acoustic mirror up to each other. The repetition builds throughout the poem into a sheer persuasion of sound. Look, it seems to say, the ruin and music of war are sensory, not logical. Here for instance is Phaestus from Tarne:

What happened to Phaestus
He came from Tarne where the soil is loose and crumbly

Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork

Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork.

This bold practice aligns Memorial even more with the old, sacred purpose of the oral tradition, which is nothing less than to be an understudy for human memory. It is this which makes Memorial – in Oswald’s eloquent phrase – ‘an oral cemetery’.

III

Of all the conversations that have sustained poetry in the last half century, few are as rich or exciting as the one about poetic translation. Memorial enters this conversation at a steep angle, sparking fresh insight and questions. We can see it evokes the Iliad. But what exactly does this evocation mean in our time and for it? How are we to read the relation between the two poems? Is Memorial a translation, an interpretation, or a restatement? A response? Certainly its originality suggests that it can’t be categorized.

The source is clear. The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War. Its composition has been located in the eighth century, although controversy about the date remains. In the narrative, the Greeks, or Achaeans, wage war against the city of Troy because one of its princes has stolen Helen, the wife of the Spartan king, Menelaus. The Iliad remains one of the most compelling works in the Western canon – a mysterious alchemy of a possibly historical war and fictional gods.

If the story of the Iliad is hard to extract from myth, its poet is even more shadowy. We have assumed him to be a single poet, but there is controversy about that, too. The few legends we have are unreliable. Some of them may have been smuggled out of folkloric texts that belong to Homer’s time but were probably the work of many poets. There is a reference to a blind Aeolian poet; there is a mention of Smyrna. But the connections are hard to prove. Across time, details have remained scarce and hard to come by. The truth is, Homer signals to us from a vast achievement, with no indulgence at all for our age of autobiography.

But one thing we do know; one thing we can hold on to. And it has everything to do with the relation between these two poems: the Iliad – at least in its original form –was recited or sung, not written. Scholars have long accepted that it is an oral composition, reaching down into the patterned words of a preliterate culture, dipping its similes and images into a deep well of musical and memorable speech.

The Greek poet Pindar, who lived a few hundred years after Homer’s time, referred to such a composition as a ‘rhapsode’ and its creator as ‘a rhapsodist’, although that term was not used in Homer’s time. There is even a hint that the rhapsodist held a wand in his hand as he began his recitation, just as the Anglo-Saxon scop recited Beowulf accompanied by a harp. In the same way, not so long ago, a traditional singer in the West of Ireland would have a man stand behind him as he sang unaccompanied, moving the singer’s arm to the beat of the song. Ancient methods of keeping time. Ancient ways of measuring the world.

The most important fact in all this, the one essential to understanding the relation between Memorial and the Iliad is in the nature of both poems: A written text is fixed. An oral composition is not. There is a splendid air of unfinished business about an oral poem. And until it was written down and standardized, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the reciter of the Iliad might well have intervened in the poem, adding and embellishing. For the reader of a later age, living in an era of fixed text, there is something bright and moving in this image of the Iliad as a river, not an inland sea, flowing in and out of song, performance, memory, elegy and human interaction.

The best way of seeing Memorial, and its relationship to the Iliad, may be right here. As an evocation of a living, fluid tradition, an ardent remaking of a poem that was almost certainly hospitable to new makers in its origin. Seen this way, as an extension of rich and ancient improvisations, Memorial has a subtle and respectful relation to the Iliad, but by no means a submissive one.

Within that relation, the poem enacts the quality Oswald points to her in her preface. ‘Matthew Arnold (and almost everyone ever since),’ she says there, ‘has praised the Iliad for its “nobility”. But ancient critics praised its “enargeia”, which means something like “bright unbearable reality”. ’ It is this reality we track as readers of Memorial, as we note the names, unite them to their owners and join both to their similes. And as we follow them to the end, we can watch this reworking of an ancient epic unfold in front of us into one of the most tender-hearted and ambitious of contemporary poems.

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About the AuthorEavan Boland was born in Dublin. The author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction, she is a professor and the director of the Creative Writing program at Stanford University.